How To Free Up Disk Space In Linux Mint / Ubuntu By Optimizing APT Cache Settings

May 15th, 2011 · Comments Off on How To Free Up Disk Space In Linux Mint / Ubuntu By Optimizing APT Cache Settings

Installing applications in Linux Mint / Ubuntu caches the installation files or setup files even when the applications installed are removed. This does take up space over a period of time.

To clean up all the unnecessary installation files, we need to change the apt cache settings which by default will never automatically remove these files.

To do this :

Open Terminal and take a look at the following file by typing :

cat/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

Notice the entry that is as follows :

APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "0";

What this means is that the auto clean interval of installation files by default is never remove (they are always stored regardless of the application for which they were used is removed or not), we can simply change it to say a weekly interval which will automatically remove these files on a weekly basis. This is done by changing the 0 to 7 so that the modified entry looks like this (you can use any text editor for this, gedit is used here) :

sudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic

Save the file for the changes to take place.

Note : If you don’t want to configure this permanently but only remove existing installation files for now, the following command also will work just fine.